Should the Twin Towers be Rebuilt?

It's been over a month now since terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center led to the collapse of the landmark twin towers. To varying degrees, and for those who can manage it, the routines of Manhattan have restarted. The city, in its myriad ways, is going about the work of going back to work.

While chain link fencing keeps casual onlookers from a close-up view, the enormous absence is visible from miles away. Stripped of its minimalist, sculptural figurehead, the prow of Manhattan seems to disappear, rather than loom, in the distance.

Meanwhile, the city's public spaces still commemorate a multitude of private absences and griefs. Collections of flowers, candles, and handwritten notes wait at corner kiosks and subway stations.

However, most New Yorkers are more-or-less ready to fulfill the promise that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani offered on the day of the crisis: "We will rebuild: We're going to come out of this stronger than before, politically stronger, economically stronger. The skyline will be made whole again."

But what should rebuilding mean? As discussions begin, they, like the practice of architecture itself, waver between the need for structural concern and the hunger for poetic gesture.

There is no shortage of opinions about how to fill the site. One might in fact make two small towers of the opinions in favor of and opposed to the rough idea of "rebuilding."

Opinion editorials from cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Dallas on rebuilding the World Trade Center suggest exact replacements, memorial gardens, peace parks constructed of combinations of ruins and plants, or different, but also double, towers. If the tower of opinion in favor of rebuilding appears higher, it is only slightly higher than its twin, which favors other courses of action.

Architectural critics are writing flurries of commentary. Scholar Michael Sorkin asserts that the idea of rebuilding towers disavows the deep, pervasive sense of rupture present in the city. James Howard Kunstler claims that the fall of the World Trade Center marks end of the skyscraper. Robert A.M. Stern believes we can and should rebuild taller buildings. At the online Architecture Forum, a diverse community of architects and lay participants are engaged in an ongoing lively discussion, with opinions represented from across the spectrum.

At meetings in New York since the attack, architects, planners, and real estate developers have also gathered to come to terms with the deeper meaning of the destruction. For some, the idea of rebuilding new identical towers seems like a ludicrous act of denial of the universal sense of loss.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of this well-publicized debate, the city of New York faces staggering logistical concerns. The New York Times reported that when the fourteen acres of glass and several miles of steel that composed the two towers collapsed, they displaced 50,000 workers and destroyed 15 million square feet of office space. In the rest of Manhattan, contiguous blocks of office space are rare. Thus, in the short term at least, New York may be on the verge of dramatic restructuring.

The city and architects may need to think outside the two boxes, and spur development in unexpected areas and far flung boroughs. The question in the short and medium term may not be the shape of the lower Manhattan, but how to ensure that short term development benefits and strengthens New York in the long term. As the city prepares to spend billions of dollars on reconstruction efforts, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, partner and chairman elect at Skidmore, Owings and Merill offered this call to architects and civic activists. "The city faces an extraordinary set of choices about infrastructure and creating a new city fabric. We must make the public aware that design can matter. We can use the set of choices ahead of us to fashion a better civic realm. We must be articulate representatives of the power of our profession. It is not a time for specifics, but an occasion for vision."